AutoCAD and Navisworks 2013 - Poor network performance

[eln0rman2]

Good morning all.

I'm an I.T. manager with little knowledge of engineering software.

Many of my engineers are complaining of slow network performance when opening a drawing, for example, in Navisworks. A slow network has always been a complaint since my start with the company 18 months ago. I'm not clear on a good starting point to identify the problem. I've read about others experiencing the same problem, suggestions using a packet sniffer to capture Autodesk network activity (what ports does Autodesk use and what should I look for?), running Windows perfmon.exe and procexp.exe to compare with packet sniffer results, looking at Autocad "search paths", Autocad hitting a plethora of folders with timeouts before moving to the next if not found, bombardment od DNS requests, etc., but nothing solid to try.

A little about my network. We're running over 1 gig HP switches, in a Dell environment (servers, laptops, a nas, and a san). The drawings are being pulled from a physcial server, not a vm. Given we have 3 sites, we're also running Globalscape Avail for mirroring. We are running Dell laptops (Latitudes E6530's) with i7 Intel processors,  16 gigs of ram, and a 1 gig NVidia video card running Autocad and Navisworks 2013. I don't immediately think it's my network because we can copy files and folders to other places on the network with ease and speed.

Today, I am planning to copy one large project from the server to a new NAS for comparison.

I'm guessing and guessing more about a direction to determine what and where the cause may be. I'm open to any thoughts or suggestions and willing to try most anything.

Eddie

[zalant · Accepted solution]

Eddie,

Your idea about testing with files located elsewhere is a good one.  We typically suggest creating a full read/write-access shared folder on another workstation, placing some DWG files into it, and letting the AutoCAD users access them from there.  That takes the server or current network location out of the equation for testing purposes.  

If you still have troubles, even in that scenario, it could be that real-time endpoint protection software is causing the slowness.  If that's the case, then exceptions should be made for either the locations where the drawings are stored, or for the various file types that AutoCAD uses when opening/saving/closing files.  Those include, DWG, DWL, DWL2, SV$, AC$, TMP, and BAK.

The article here covers what happens when AutoCAD opens and saves files, and the various files involved in the process.